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Welcome to the Buddhist Boot Camp Podcast. Our intention is to awaken, enlighten, enrich,

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and inspire a simple and uncomplicated life.

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Discover the benefits of mindful living with your host, Timber Hawkeye.

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When I think of judgment, I think of holding onto a story of how we think life "should" be,

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or how other people "should" behave, or how we "should" have done things. The word 

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"Should," if you have ever studied NVC, Non-Violent Communication, is quite hostile,

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and it creates this blueprint that we have in our minds of how life is supposed to 

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turn out, and every time it turns out differently, we judge it as bad, wrong,

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or somehow subpar to the ideal we have in our heads. And a lot of that applies to

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people's behavior and how we think they "should" respond to circumstances

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 in their lives. And I think the greatest lesson I learned was when I was a Holocaust docent,

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I went to school to learn about World War II

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so I can turn around and teach high school kids about it, but I think more importantly 

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than meeting with survivors or, perhaps equally as important, was to sit down with

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what are now members of the KKK, and understand why and what got them to where 

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they are. Not for the sake of condemning them or telling them they're wrong,

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or proving them wrong, but to just understand: how did you end up 

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where you are? And when you hear the story of a young boy who struggled so much

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to fit in as a kid and was bullied in the playground, and had a really terrible, violent,

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home life and just needed a place to fit in  

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and was so desperate to just not fight internally anymore and just find a place 

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to call home. And then he's approached by the Brotherhood, as they called themselves

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and they welcomed him in as one of them. 

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And he finally has this love, this place, that embraces him, which is all he really wants.

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And you can kind of understand how one day he could be so close to suicide and giving up,

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because the whole world feels against him, and then being embraced

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by this Brotherhood. Why, that sounds so welcoming. And it's interesting for these 

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groups to almost always need to have an enemy figure because it creates cohesion

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 within the group, it gives everybody in the group something to be against. 

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And so immediately I stepped away from judgment and thinking that these people

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are less than me, and actually being able to relate their childhood with my childhood,

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and just realized that we've made just different choices that have led us 

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to where we are. And so letting go of judgment is this beautiful heart-opening 

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exercise that I've had to deal with in my own life. When I was in high school,

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it was my last year of high school, I found out that my girlfriend was pregnant

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and it wasn't because we were being careless, she was epileptic and the pills she was taking 

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for epilepsy were Tegretol, which canceled out the birth control pills, and the doctors

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didn't know it at the time, and condoms don't always work. And we learned the very

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important lesson, albeit too late, that if you're not ready  to do the deed then... or...

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if you're not ready for the consequences, you're not ready to do the deed.

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So she was in this really interesting situation because she was very pro-life 

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up to that moment. And then she found herself pregnant with the medical decision 

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to make that she can't keep the child and stay on the Tegretol pills. So it was this really 

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interesting situation where it was a very difficult decision to make, and it was only

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made more difficult by the people outside the clinic who were calling her a murderer

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as if the day wasn't hard enough already. And so I think it's important for us to not make 

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any judgments about a situation we haven't even been in ourselves yet, and definitely 

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not make any judgments about somebody else's situation. Because everyone

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is battling  their own demons that we know absolutely nothing about.

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Timber Hawkeye is the bestselling author of Faithfully Religionless

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and Buddhist Boot Camp. 

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For additional information, please visit BuddhistBootCamp.com,

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where you can order autographed books to support the Prison Library Project,

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watch Timber's inspiring TED Talk, and join our monthly mailing list.

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We hope you have enjoyed this episode,

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and invite you to subscribe for more thought-provoking discussions.

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Thank you for being a Soldier of Peace in the Army of Love. 🙏